


A Prince, Golden in the Sun

by toujours_nigel



Category: Harry Potter - Rowling
Genre: Chromatic Character, F/M, Infidelity, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-03-24
Updated: 2010-03-24
Packaged: 2017-10-08 07:03:58
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 300
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/73970
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/toujours_nigel/pseuds/toujours_nigel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He weds at twenty-three.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Prince, Golden in the Sun

He is wed in October, in 2003. He has been twenty-three a sum of four months, and his bride eighteen thirty days less. They are well matched, pale and slender, with porcelain blue eyes and nervous features, blue veins showing too easily under skin grown transparent with years of good breeding—they are like matched thoroughbreds, blond and black, and the pulse in her wrist in his palm is like a caught bird’s frantic fluttering.

But the smile she turns up to him is confident radiance, and her step is sure, and her mouth sweet when he leans in for the perfunctory kiss, to elicit polite clapping from the gathered guests—friends still with them through the lean years, congregating around his father, golden strength silvered—his father is fifty, now, and his shoulders broad enough to shoulder his burdens. His mother beside him is radiant as a stained glass window with the sun shining through, and as lovely, as unearthly.

He will take that place, soon, that he has fought to restore to his father, and his bride’s quiet strength is assurance that she, like his mother, will prove a blade of tempered steel. He will succeed, as his father did, and better him. He cannot not, having the advantage of youth at the time of his last errors—never crimes, but mistakes easily forgiven a frightened child—having the grace to admit them, and apologise, and forge strong seeming friendships from childhood dislikes.

And then, too, his wedding has the fairy-tale of a boy waiting for his beloved to grow up, and sentimentality is a trait easily manipulated, and he knows his smile genuine as he looks at Astoria in animated conversation with her sister and their friend. The flashing cameras cannot tell on whom his eyes linger.


End file.
